Breuer is one of the last artists to have studied at the Düsseldorf Academy with Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose teaching influenced a generation of German photographers including Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff. Like his teachers, Breuer accumulates individual examples of architectural types-in this case, the façades of transnational, post-industrial corporations that line the highways of the world. Photographed frontally under blank white skies, the buildings appear flat and insubstantial, like floating billboards. Unlike the ugly but endearing modernist behemoths photographed by the Bechers, these vaguely sinister false fronts-here, of Nike and Philip Morris-reveal nothing of what goes on inside, instead projecting the pure hypnotic power of a logo over a bright monochrome surface like heraldic emblems in an age of globalized commerce.

Exhibition History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Modern Photographs from the Collection VI," January 14, 2003–June 13, 2003.